Seventeen Days
by Red River
Summary: "The first day was the best day they were going to have for weeks. Not that Danny had the benefit of knowing that at the time. If he had, he would have tried to savor it a little more." In the wake of Steve's abduction in Afghanistan, Danny struggles to put his partner back together, with or without Steve's acceptance that he's broken. Episode tag to 4x21. Established pairing.


A/N: I've really enjoyed the reboot of Hawaii Five-0 and the chemistry between Steve and Danny. That said, though, I struggle sometimes with how little Steve's experiences and occasional traumas as a Navy SEAL seem to affect him. I felt this especially after the events of 4x21 were never explored from a psychological perspective. This story was written to fill in a few of the gaps, with an eye toward how Danny and Steve might deal with the aftermath. Please enjoy.

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**Seventeen Days**

The first day was the best day they were going to have for weeks. Not that Danny had the benefit of knowing that at the time. If he had, he would have tried to savor it a little more, soak up the hours of the flight back from Afghanistan, though the plane was just as inhospitable as before and the in-flight meal—if "meal" was a word that could be applied to something that came out of a foil bag—hit the back of his throat in a way that made Danny wonder if the military hadn't just decided to skip a step and vacuum-pack vomit. Instead of a row of soldiers who could've at least provided a canteen to help him wash it down, his only company this time was a very sorry-looking Steve McGarrett strapped to a shaky gurney and loopy on his IV painkillers—but it was good, he was good and Steve was good, or he was going to be, and Steve laughed at him when he spit a half-chewed mouthful of chum back into the ration bag, and Danny was too busy oscillating between pissed and relieved and scared out of his mind to realize that this was the best things were going to get for seventeen days. He never imagined there would be days he'd want that revolting ration pack back.

* * *

The second day Steve mostly slept. That should have been one of the good days, but somehow it wasn't—Danny spent all day staring at the battered figure rolled up in the master bed, wincing every time Steve forgot about his black and blues and rolled over on something he shouldn't have. He wasted twenty minutes contemplating the practicality of strapping his partner's head to the pillow so he'd stop turning over on his fractured orbital bone, and he knew without being told that that was not a good sign. When Steve wasn't good, Danny wasn't good. He put his head down on his folded hands and listened to snippets of the game from the TV in the front room, and didn't care that he couldn't work out who won.

* * *

The fifth day they got into it for the first time. Steve was a Navy Seal with the same approximate brain power as Australopithecus—and yes, occasionally Danny wondered if those two things were related—but he also had a good four inches on Danny's very toned, svelte five foot five, and so naturally felt obligated to disregard his partner and all common sense the second he could move around without a human crutch. And Danny was not trying to be petulant about this, but it was not his imagination that Steve got jackass stubborn about the most ridiculous things when he was on the mend.

"Steven, I am not going to say this again. I shouldn't even have to say this once, because you are an adult and adults are supposed to have better judgment than this. But you are not running the two miles to the convenience store at midnight to pick up peanut butter ice cream bars."

He had caught Steve at the door, already dressed, his hand on the knob. If he'd spent two more minutes in the shower, he would have stepped out of the fog into an empty house. Not that Steve seemed to understand how close even that idea brought him to losing his shit.

"How is this a big deal?" Steve asked, as if he wasn't waving dismissively with his one good hand, as if he didn't still have butterfly bandages holding his swollen face together. "I run to the store all the time."

"All the time, yes," Danny conceded. "But there needs to be a limit on your insanity, and _all the time_ does not include those occasions when your left arm is wrapped up in a sling and you have an orbital fracture. Don't tell me you lost track of that under your puffy purple cheek?"

There was more, barbs he didn't want to throw—that Steve never looked like this when he was about to head out, one-third shaky and two-thirds wild, and even in the middle of the night, when it might have been a reasonable precaution, Danny had never seen him head out for a run before with his gun tucked into his waistband. Plus Danny was almost positive there were still boxes of ice cream bars in the deep freeze, and that meant that this was about something else, something that was better worked out at home than out in the dark with a gun and a nightmare perched on his shoulder. Danny took hold of Steve's arm and tugged him back toward the living room, trying not to be frustrated when his partner didn't move an inch.

"Look. I know that you want all this to just be over, okay? I get it. One day bad, next day good. But there's this gray area in the middle that they call healing, and if you don't let that happen, Steve, the bad's only going to take longer. So would you just sit down? Please?"

Something flickered across Steve's face as he stared out the front window, but it was gone too fast for Danny to catch. Then Steve was, too, slipping out of his hold as he deflated, headed back for the couch.

"Fine."

Danny breathed out. "Fine. Good. Thank you for being reasonable. Now—before you get that grouchy look on your face, remember that against all odds, man invented personal transportation. Let me grab my car keys and we can go." But even before he'd finished, Danny could see he'd lost him as Steve slumped onto the couch and kicked his feet up on the throw pillow, tuning the TV to the game like he'd never tried to go anywhere in the first place.

"You know what, don't bother," Steve said. "You could stand to lose a few anyway."

"Excuse you?" Danny said, but what he wanted to say was he was pretty sure he'd already lost more than a few.

* * *

The sixth day—more like night—Steve jerked up in bed breathing hard, eyes wide and glazed in the glow of the alarm clock. Danny was honestly surprised it had taken so long. He sat up, too, mimicked Steve's posture, leaning forward over his raised knees; he pressed one hand to Steve's back and felt the shudders racing through his muscles.

"Hey, hey, hey. You okay?" Danny whispered, dragging his thumb up the short hairs at the nape of Steve's neck. Before he reached his face, Steve had already turned away, flopping back into the pillows on his bad side.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm good," he mumbled into the pillowcase. Blind in the island dark, Danny couldn't tell if he was choked up or just checked out.

That was the last sleep either of them got on day six.

* * *

By day nine, Danny was very carefully restraining himself from pulling out handfuls of hair—his or Steve's, yet to be determined. Steve had always had a very unfortunate recovery attitude, Danny knew that on the first day, but by the ninth day his nerves were down to a thread, the product of 216 hours of watching Steve toss and turn at night and then spend all day dodging mirrors and pressing callused fingers to his swollen cheek when he thought Danny wasn't looking, and telling Danny he was fine. Like _fine_ was a thing you could be nine days after going through what he went through. Like Danny expected him to be _fine_, wanted him to be _fine_—which he did, obviously, but not if this was _fine_, if _fine_ was a masquerade Steve put on every day pretending to be the good soldier, army of one, unbreakable. If that was how it was going to be, Danny wished he'd just fuck it and be broken instead so they could fix it. Danny was pretty good at fixing things, he thought, he'd been told, but Steve had to let him in before he could find out where it hurt.

On day nine, Danny was standing in the kitchen chopping onions for tomato sauce when Steve walked into the kitchen and jumped out of his skin. Danny had no idea what it was that freaked him out about onion flakes on the flat of the dull chef's knife—all he knew was, one minute Steve was reaching into the fridge for a beer and the next he had his back against the cabinets and the beer was just foam and glass on the floor, splattering over his socks. Danny almost missed Steve's surprised hiss in the ruckus of the bottle breaking, but there was no missing the panic in those dark eyes as Steve's hand clenched around the corkscrew.

"Whoa! Whoa! Take it easy, babe." Danny put his hands up in the classic fashion, and then slowly lowered the knife back to the cutting board, grabbing the paper towels and getting to work on the floor before the beer ruined more than his socks. He looked up once to ask Steve to hand him the broom, but he thought better of it as he took in his partner still slumped against the cabinet doors, his heart beating so hard Danny could practically see it jumping under his skin.

They weathered three minutes in silence except for the sizzle of foam and the sweep of old bristles before Danny couldn't take it anymore.

"Hey, look." Steve's eyes followed him as he dumped the last shards into the trash can, but he still seemed unprepared for Danny to turn around, flinching a little as their gazes locked. Danny leaned into the counter and drummed his hands on the Formica, leaving beer and onion fingerprints and not caring because he was searching for the words he'd said over and over in his head. "I'm not going to push you, Steven, but I think it might be good for you to talk to someone about what happened over there. Someone you trust. Someone who loves you."

Steve ducked his head. For a second he gazed so intently at the floor Danny wondered if he'd missed a spot, if he was going to step on a forgotten fragment of glass and get it right through his beer-stained socks. Then Steve nodded and levered himself up, away from the cabinet, out the door back into the living room.

"Thanks for not pushing."

Danny chucked the onions, got out a premade jar of sauce and stood over the tile floor for a long time with the glass jar in his hands, talking himself out of breaking that too.

* * *

On the twelfth day, Danny almost lost it, seriously almost lost it. For the first time in his life he was glad Grace didn't call to say goodnight to him—too busy having the time of her life at sleepaway camp—because he probably would have snapped at her and he did not do that, that was something Danny did not do. He had taken eleven sick days in a row, because they could fire him before they could expect him to turn up at Five-0 while Steve needed taking care of, but on the twelfth day Chin and Kono got into a bad situation and needed some backup, just for an hour, he was gone maybe seventy-five minutes total, and when he stepped back into the McGarrett house it was to find Steve up a ladder with no spot, replacing the trim at the top of the living room walls and swinging a hammer back and forth two inches at best from his orbital fracture. If there was any chance it wouldn't have killed him, Danny would have yanked him down by the back of his pants.

"What the hell is the matter with you?" Danny demanded, when they were all safely on the ground again and Steve had put the hammer down. "Your left arm's in a cast—if you'd slipped, you wouldn't have a hand to catch yourself, and then you'd get that hammer claw right in your empty skull. I don't know why this isn't common sense for you, but you cannot do things like this!"

"Look, I'm fine," Steve insisted, a little too sharply for the smile on his face, that condescending smile that was almost good, almost Steve. But almost wasn't good enough, and Danny was 288 hours exhausted of this game Steve was trying to play with himself, to trick himself into being okay.

Danny ran a hand back through his hair. "No, you're not fine, Steven. You have been through a deeply traumatic experience that you refuse to deal with because you're still trying to be the perfect Navy Seal, this untouchable guy who just shrugs off capture and…and torture, and broken bones. But you're not, okay? You're not, and I know you're not, and this is me, so I don't know why you're trying to pretend this isn't getting to you." He wasn't sure when he'd stepped into Steve's space, but Steve wasn't budging, never did when he was upset, so Danny lifted his head, staring up into the six inches between them. "No one cares about your reputation anymore, all right? No one cares about how tough you are. All I care about is you," he finished, and didn't wonder until it was over why he was almost shouting, why he'd punctuated his last point by jabbing Steve in the chest. Realized as Steve stepped around him and headed for the door what an idiotic thing that had been to do, because the only things Steve wouldn't fight about where the important things.

"Hey."

He heard Steve stop in the doorway, but that was the only answer he got. Danny pinched the bridge of his nose, took a second and turned it all around in his head, because he knew better than this.

"Hey, babe, I'm sorry. It was a…bad day to go out, that's all. Traffic on the turnpike was atrocious. Road rage, you know…just makes my brain boil." Without looking back, he could feel Steve smiling, probably just a little curve at the edge of his mouth, but Danny could work with that. He'd worked with less.

"So, what's the deal with this trim? We putting it up or what?" He pivoted and met Steve's gaze, eyebrow raised, preempted the question with a raised finger. "I get to take the ladder. You can be my lovely and talented assistant."

For a second he thought Steve wasn't going to go for it, that he'd walk out and leave him hanging—then Steve's eyes flicked up to the ceiling and back down to Danny, a little more of that smile tugging at his lips. "I don't think the ladder will get you up there," he teased.

"Oh, that's nice. Very funny," Danny griped. "Maybe I'll just stand on your ridiculously broad Hulk shoulders, huh? What do you have to say to that?"

Steve pressed his right palm to the strap of his sling. "Broken arm," he said, his smile turning cheeky at the corners.

Danny wished the other breaks were as easy to see.

* * *

The fifteenth day was great until, halfway through the football game, Chin and Kono over for the first time in a week, an instant replay of a bad tackle got a little too graphic, spray of blood bursting from the receiver's lip as his head jerked around on his neck, and Danny felt Steve tense up beside him, his fingernails clenching into the creases of his khakis. Danny looked up at Steve to see his jaw stiff, eyes locked on the replay like he was testing himself, torturing himself for feeling something, and not for the first time Danny wondered how much longer it was going to be like this, how much more of this Steve could take.

* * *

In the last hour of the sixteenth day, Danny woke up at eight minutes to midnight to find Steve sitting up in the bed beside him, arms locked across the tops of his knees, an expression on his face that Danny could read right through the dark. He sat up slowly, because sometimes Steve was too much like a wild animal for his own good, easy to startle, and Danny couldn't bear one more day of this.

"Hey," he whispered into the black, watched Steve tip his chin, just enough to show he'd heard. "What's going on, huh? What are you doing up?"

Steve rubbed a hand across his cropped hair. "Nothing. Just…you know. Thinking."

Like he had ten nights previous, Danny leaned forward until they were sitting right next to each other, copied his pose, let their fingers brush at the edge of their knees—but this time, thank God, Steve didn't pull away, and Danny risked a few more words, leaning into his partner just far enough to show Steve his shoulder was steady. "Okay. That's good. Good start. What are you thinking about?"

Steve dropped his head against his folded arms, closed his eyes. Danny could tell by the way his exhale turned into a sigh, heavy and sad against his hot skin. "I don't know, Danny. I just—I don't know."

Danny nudged their shoulders together. "Hey. Look, that's fine. Why don't you tell me about it, and then we can not know together."

That made Steve laugh into his arms. At least, Danny thought it was a laugh. Usually Steve's laugh was a wild thing, unstoppable and unbecoming and more often than not at his expense. This was more like a breath that stuttered a few times, and then hitched at the end, where it stopped being funny, maybe.

There was a long minute where neither of them said anything before Steve lifted his head again—not much, just enough to rest his chin on his crossed wrists, for Danny to catch the wetness in his eyes. Steve dragged his hands down his face and winced as he hit the last of the swelling in his cheek. "I'm a mess," he rasped out finally. Another pause, and then: "Look, Danny…if you want to get away for a couple days, take Grace on a trip or something, I understand."

"Go away?" Danny repeated. "Who's going anywhere? Who d'you think you're talking to right now? You see anyone in this room turning tail and running? No." He nudged Steve's toes with his own, bumping up against the long, smooth bow of his foot. "I am thoroughly insulted and I should kick your ass for that, but I'll save that until you're…less obviously emotionally distraught." That time he was sure he'd gotten a laugh, and he relaxed into Steve's shoulder a little more, dropping an arm around his partner's back because he was sick of leaving Steve a way out, sick of Steve taking it. "Come on. What is it?"

The words came slowly—but Steve had never been much of a talker, not on emotional matters, and it wasn't like Danny was going anywhere.

"I just keep replaying it, you know. The room, the smell of blood, the sound of his voice—when he picked up that machete, man, I thought…" Steve broke off, took a deep, slow breath that Danny could feel all the way through his arm, Steve's muscles quivering the way they were never supposed to in fear, the way they were only supposed to shake when he and Danny made love in this bed and soared right over the top of the world. Steve pressed his fingers into his eyes and breathed out into his palm, cupping the hot air against his face. "I wasn't sure I was going to make it this time. It's not the first time that's happened, but…it's the first time I've been afraid of it, I guess. Of not making it."

Danny tightened his arm around Steve's back, felt the answering release of bones pressing into him.

"Bullshit."

Steve jerked his head up, blinking too fast. "What?"

"Bullshit," Danny said again, slower this time in case he hadn't been clear. "Listen to me. I don't care that you're an inhuman super-soldier who should be part of an international crime-fighting league, okay? That is not the first time you've been afraid. You know why? Because that would mean that's the first time you've been afraid of not making it back to me. And I have been afraid of losing you before, and that means you have, too."

Steve stared at him through the dark, slack-jawed, his mouth open just far enough that Danny could see light from the alarm clock glinting off his teeth. Then he gave a short, sharp laugh, his breath bursting out of him like he couldn't control it, and Danny pulled him in, kissed his mouth shut, because it had been too damn long since he'd kissed a laugh off of Steve McGarrett's lips.

"You're a pompous ass," Steve said when they broke apart.

"And you are an emotionally stunted gargoyle," Danny returned, "a rock that grew legs and walked out of the prehistoric sea. I don't even know where they dug you up."

Steve was still laughing as his head crashed down on Danny's shoulder and Danny guided it into the crook of his neck so he could get both arms around his partner, hold him so close there was no chance of him slipping away again. Blind, relieved, he laid his cheek against the top of Steve's head and kissed his dark hair, felt Steve's laughter hitch—because wasn't that the way it always was, always hardest to let go when there was someone there to catch you.

"It's okay," Danny whispered. "I got you, babe. I got you, swear to God."

Steve fell asleep so fast after that Danny wondered if those were the words he'd been waiting to hear all along.

* * *

Day seventeen: Danny woke up to the glorious midafternoon sun and Steve sprawled out on the pillows next to him, offering that cheeky smile. It was all good from that point forward.


End file.
